Reflection 03/03/2019

Mardi Gras is this week, which also means that Ash Wednesday and the 40 Days of Lent are upon us. I don’t know about you, but often times Lent sneaks up on me. By that I mean that I tend to not know what I am going to give up for Lent before Ash Wednesday. Some years it took me a day or two into Lent to figure that out. Just like with most things, the better we prepare for Lent, the more we enter into this great penitential season, and we experience a better Easter.
The Gospel for every Ash Wednesday focuses on the classic three-fold remedy to sin, which is prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We tend to just focus on the fasting during Lent. The Church asks us to abstain from meat on Fridays, and the things we do on our own is fasting as well, such as giving up sweets. But we need all three to better ourselves spiritually.
Prayer is the lifeblood of our soul, that is it keeps us connected to Christ. As our bodies need air to survive, our souls need prayer to be spiritually alive. I think all of us agree that we could pray a little more than we do currently. In developing our prayer life, what is important is fostering a daily habit of prayer. We need to go to Christ everyday. And if we are not in the habit of doing this, starting with a few minutes a day is a good start. That’s not a bad commitment for Lent, praying for a few minutes everyday.
Fasting is a good thing to do for many reasons. In the context of Lent, fasting helps us to overcome our impulses that we tend to give in to. Fasting helps us to conquer the temptations that often lead to us giving into our habitual sins. Due to our fallen nature, we all have habitual sins. If we don’t know what ours are, all we have to do is go to Confession twice within a short amount of time and we will easily see our habitual sins, as we’ll be confessing similar things. When we fast during Lent, we should do more than just give up foods that we like to indulge in, or commit to eating healthy, as good as these things are. We should identify that one habitual sin we give in to, and make a concrete commitment to avoid the near occasion to that sin.
Almsgiving might be the forgotten Lenten remedy. Strictly speaking almsgiving is giving money to those in need. We who have should be generous to those who have not. More generally, I think we can view almsgiving to mean doing acts of charity. In this sense, almsgiving helps us to put others before ourselves. It helps us to see Christ in others more. What a great thing to do during Lent, putting others before ourselves.
Let us think about what we want to do for Lent now. Let us have a great Lent this year, so that we will have a more joyful Easter.